Fanny Burney and Her Friends: Select Passages from Her Diary and Other Writings. Burney Fanny

a lofty slip of a room; nor a quarter of a staircase, leading to some quaint unfrequented apartment; nor a wooden chimney-piece, cut in diamonds, squares, and round knobs, surmounting another of blue and white tiles, representing, vis-à-vis, a dog and a cat, as symbols of married life and harmony.”^[10]

      The time arrived when, in accordance with their father’s original design, Frances and Charlotte Burney should have been placed at school in Paris in succession to Esther and Susanna. Burney presently made another journey to the French capital to bring back the pair of sisters who had completed the term of two years assigned for their education there, but he was not accompanied by either of his other daughters. He was not deterred from taking them by any misgiving as to the results of his first experiment, which, we are assured, had fully answered his expectations, but rather by some uncertainty of means and plans, connected, perhaps, in part with his approaching second marriage. Some lines from the pen of Susanna have been preserved, which are said to have been written shortly after her return, and which, if the date ascribed to them be correct, would show that the writer, who was then barely fourteen, was a remarkably forward girl of her age. As this short composition sketches in contrast Susanna’s two elder sisters, we give it entire:

      “Hetty seems a good deal more lively than she used to appear at Paris; whether it is that her spirits are better, or that the great liveliness of the inhabitants made her appear grave there by comparison, I know not: but she was there remarkable for being sérieuse, and is here for being gay and lively. She is a most sweet girl. My sister Fanny is unlike her in almost everything, yet both are very amiable, and love each other as sincerely as ever sisters did. The characteristics of Hetty seem to be wit, generosity and openness of heart: Fanny’s—sense, sensibility, and bashfulness, and even a degree of prudery. Her understanding is superior, but her diffidence gives her a bashfulness before company with whom she is not intimate, which is a disadvantage to her. My eldest sister shines in conversation, because, though very modest, she is totally free from any mauvaise honte: were Fanny equally so, I am persuaded she would shine no less. I am afraid that my eldest sister is too communicative, and that my sister Fanny is too reserved. They are both charming girls—des filles comme il y en a peu.”

      Burney’s second marriage took place not long after the return of Esther and Susanna from Paris. His choice on this occasion was an intimate friend of the first Mrs. Burney, whom she succeeded after an interval of six years. This lady was the widow of Mr. Stephen Allen, a merchant of Lynn, and by him the parent of several children. The young Allens had been playmates of the young Burneys. If not equal in mind or person to the adored Esther Sleepe, Mrs. Allen was a handsome and well-instructed woman, and proved an excellent stepmother to Fanny and her sisters, as well as an admirable wife to their father. For some reason or other, the nature of which does not very clearly appear, it was judged desirable that not only the engagement between the widow and widower should be kept secret, but that their wedding should be celebrated in private. They were married some time in the spring of 1768, at St. James’s, Piccadilly, by the curate, an old acquaintance of the bridegroom, their intention being confided to three other friends only. Crisp, who was one of these, had clearly no mind that Burney’s new connection should put an end to their alliance, or deprive himself of the relief which the visits of the widower and his children had afforded to the monotony of his retirement. The freshly married couple carried their secret and their happiness ‘to the obscure skirts of the then pathless, and nearly uninhabited Chesington Common, where Mr. Crisp had engaged for them a rural and fragrant retreat, at a small farm-house in a little hamlet a mile or two from Chesington Hall.’

      The secret, we are further told, as usual in matrimonial concealments, was faithfully preserved for a time by careful vigilance, and then escaped through accident. Betrayed by the loss of a letter, Mrs. Burney came openly to town to be introduced to her husband’s circle, and presently took her place at the head of his household in Poland Street. The young people on both sides accepted their new relationships with pleasure. The long-deferred scheme of sending Fanny and her youngest sister to Paris was now finally abandoned. Susanna undertook to instruct Fanny in French, and Charlotte was put to school in Norfolk. For some years the united families spent their summer holidays at Lynn, where Mrs. Burney had a dower-house. But, whether in town or country, Frances and Susanna were specially devoted to each other. Susan alone was Fanny’s confidante in her literary attempts.

      As the latter’s age increased, her passion for writing became more confirmed. Every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice was at once covered with her manuscript. She was not long in finding out that her turn was mainly for story-telling and humorous description. The two girls laughed and cried together over the creations of the elder’s fancy, but the native timidity of the young author, and still more, perhaps, her father’s low estimate of her capacity, made her apprehend nothing but ridicule if what she scribbled were disclosed to others. She worked then under the rose, imposing the strictest silence on her faithful accomplice. When in London, she plied her pen in a closet up two pair of stairs, that was appropriated to the younger children as a playroom. At Lynn, she would shut herself up to write in a summer-house, which went by the name of ‘The Cabin.’ Yet all her simple precautions could not long elude the suspicion of her sharp-sighted stepmother. The second Mrs. Burney was a bustling, sociable person, who did not approve of young ladies creeping out of sight to study; though herself fond of books, and, as we learn, a particular admirer of Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey,’ then recently published, she was a matron of the period, and could not tolerate the idea of a young woman under her control venturing on the disesteemed career of literature. The culprit, therefore, was seriously and frequently admonished to check her scribbling propensity. Some morsels of her compositions, falling into the hands of Mrs. Burney, appear to have added point to the censor’s remarks. Fanny was warned not to waste time and thought over idle inventions; and she was further cautioned, and not unreasonably, according to the prevailing notions of the day, as to the discredit she would incur if she came before the public as a female novelist. The future author of ‘Cecilia’ was only too ready to assent to this view, and to cry peccavi. She bowed before her stepmother’s rebukes, and prepared herself inwardly for a great act of sacrifice. Seizing an opportunity when her father was at Chesington, and Mrs. Burney was in Norfolk, ‘she made over to a bonfire, in a paved play-court, her whole stock’ of prose manuscripts.

The fact of the auto da fé rests on the authority of the penitent herself: her niece and biographer, Mrs. Barrett, adds that Susanna stood by, weeping at the pathetic spectacle; but this is perhaps only a legendary accretion to the tale. It seems certain that Fanny fell into error, when, long years afterwards, she wrote of the incident as having occurred on her fifteenth birthday.^[11] Fanny was never very careful about her dates, and she was unquestionably more than fifteen when her father’s second marriage took place. In spite of this, we are not warranted in questioning Mrs. Barrett’s express statement that her aunt’s famous Diary was commenced at the age of fifteen. Though of that portion of the Diary which belongs to the years preceding the publication of ‘Evelina,’ only the opening passages have been printed, and though the style of these may seem to betoken a more advanced age than that mentioned, the whole was before the biographer when she wrote, and the contents must have spoken for themselves.

      Frances Burney had burned her papers with the full intention of breaking off altogether the baneful habit of authorship. Doubtless, however, she did not consider that her resolution of total abstinence debarred her from keeping a journal; and she was not long in discovering that, however steadfastly she might resist the impulses of her fancy, its wings were always pluming themselves for a flight. The latest-born of her literary bantlings committed to the flames had been a tale setting forth the fortunes and fate of Caroline Evelyn, who was feigned to be the daughter of a gentleman by a low-bred wife, and, after the death of her father, to contract a clandestine marriage with a faithless baronet, and then to survive her husband’s desertion of her just long enough to give birth to a female child. The closing incident of this tragic and tragically-destroyed production left a lively impression on the mind of the writer. Her imagination dwelt on the singular situations to which the infant, as she grew up, would be exposed by the lot that placed her between the rival claims of her vulgar grandmother and her mother’s more refined connections, and on the social contrasts and collisions, at once unusual and natural,